JUST BORIS: A Tale of Blond Ambition (48 page)

Now under massive pressure from the Tory leadership, as well as the media itself, he called an impromptu press conference and trotted out the tired old politico line that he had been ‘misquoted.’ But the BBC, who broke the story, stood by it. So, Boris – who coincidentally now weighed in at 17 stone – quickly backtracked and in a humiliating climb-down, declared Oliver variously a ‘national saint’ and a ‘messiah.’ He also went on to say that junk food should be banned from schools. At least he deftly ducked questions about whether he was going to apologise or resign before asking, ‘What is the story? Don’t you think you might be over-egging this?’ Excessive egg or not, the truth was that top Tories were furious that Boris’s remarks were overshadowing his leader’s carefully crafted speech. He had created a good deal of resentment and anger, but for what?

‘It was a perfect storm,’ recalls Matthew Parris, one of the journalists covering the fray that day, ‘but he didn’t entirely like it. This view of Boris as a kind of bouncy, “golly gosh, what have I done, isn’t this appalling, never mind” person isn’t quite right. Like lots of us, he has a trouble-making demon, a demon that
enjoys
the trouble, so he plays it up but then he worries he’s gone too far. And so when I came across him in a car park later, he was looking genuinely downcast. The two halves of his character are more pronounced, more exotic and more obviously in warfare against each other than with most of us.’

The following day, 4 October, Cameron joked about Boris in his speech, saying he had ‘put his foot in it’ but insisting that he did not mind him going ‘off message.’ Joking apart, the Tory leader was obviously infuriated because he had not been given the clear media run he wanted. So, was this just another Boris death wish or an explosion of frustration and envy? And what good did it do him except place him at the centre of a media firestorm for 24 hours? What was clear was that with only a narrow lead over Labour, it was the last thing the Tories had planned or wanted (but being Boris, there was little they could do about it).

‘There have been specific occasions when I have been there when
David has had to ring Boris and reprimand him,’ says Andrew Mackay, then Cameron’s senior parliamentary and political adviser. ‘Any leader with a colleague who does something that brings the party into disrepute, or confuses the message, or causes unreasonable controversy will be cross. And Boris was always mea culpa about it; he’d be theatrical, like a child. Having said that, I always felt that rightly there was a “Boris is Boris” element. The leader gave him more licence than he would to others.’

By this point Simon Heffer, a fellow columnist on Boris’s own newspaper, the
Telegraph
, was no longer in the mood for ‘giving licence.’ Although claiming to harbour ‘some affection’ for Boris after working alongside him for nearly 20 years, he declared: ‘A man blessed with high intelligence and great abilities has, through moral failure and self-indulgence, now largely ceased to be taken seriously in public life.’
⁹

And yet Boris seemed not to be able to resist pressing yet more thorns into the leadership’s side. Only a week later, his
Telegraph
column laid out a case – apparently in all seriousness – for giving the Iranians the nuclear bomb. They would eventually acquire one any way, the argument went, so better for the Americans to lend them assistance with the technology in exchange for extracting agreements on being nicer to the Israelis and accelerating the move towards genuine democracy. It was one of those moments when a Boris-watcher gasps and asks: Is this for real?

‘The column absolutely enraged [shadow foreign secretary] William Hague,’ a source close to Boris recalls. ‘The word around Parliament was that he had been about to be moved to shadow minister for Europe and that he wasn’t as a direct result. The problem is that he’s much more extreme in print than he is in person – he’s a showman. When he’s writing columns he’s thinking what will be amusing or controversial to say rather than what it is that he actually thinks. His column is a weekly Oxbridge entrance essay. Just like in the film
The History Boys
, he is taking something and then turning it on its head in order to show how clever he is.’ Boris may have relinquished the
Spectator
but he was clearly still driven by journalistic rather than political imperatives, by his love of a clever argument well constructed over a viable, if duller policy.

‘The trouble was also that Boris never played the game that shadow ministers play,’ the source continues. ‘For a start, most ambitious politicians who are trying to be promoted are obsessed with getting their researchers to table Parliamentary Questions trying to get statistics to turn into stories – it’s their way of doing their bit for the party and getting noticed at the same time. But Boris wasn’t interested in playing that game and certainly never asked his researchers to play it for him.’

After 16 months of thankless toiling away on university campuses, Boris was paying the price for not ‘playing the game’. An original Cameron supporter, he must have felt that he had hardly received the payback he naïvely expected – particularly from a fellow Etonian. Around March 2007, he started talking to a few confidants about a new idea. ‘I remember him saying that becoming Mayor of London would be a fun job to do,’ says one insider. ‘He would mention it every couple of weeks or so.’

Ironically, the idea had a close Henley connection: elected mayors in Britain were first mooted in the 1980s by Boris’s Henley successor, Michael Heseltine. Word got round the party, but nothing came of it. Yet the situation of Conservative mayoral candidate for the forthcoming 2008 election was certainly vacant. In 2006, Cameron had decided on a new-fangled US-style primary election to find a candidate in which non-Tories could also vote. The original thought was that a big name from outside politics would enter the fray but it never happened. In fact, the whole exercise had had to be embarrassingly postponed in August 2006 when it failed to produce a candidate with even a residue of star quality. Meanwhile, an unofficial candidate from the modernising wing of the party – and a friend of Cameron’s – had been enthusiastically working on his campaign. Nick Boles had even given up the security and salary of his job as director of Policy Exchange, the Cameroon think-tank, to do so. But although thoughtful, clever, metropolitan and gay, he was not the high-profile figure that the Tory leadership believed could win against the wily Labour incumbent, Ken Livingstone.

An increasingly desperate Cameron decided to take personal control of the search. Figures approached or under consideration included (Lord) Sebastian Coe, Lord Stevens of Kirkwhelpington (formerly Sir John Stevens, head of the Metropolitan Police), the former ambassador to the US Sir Christopher Meyer, TV presenters Anne Robinson and Andrew Neil, the ex-army chief General Sir Mike Jackson, Nick Ferrari of LBC and Sir John Major. For one reason or another, they all faded away.

Veronica Wadley, editor of the
Evening Standard
, had been persistently pushing Boris’s name to Cameron (and anyone else who would listen) as the obvious candidate since at least Christmas 2005, when Cameron had invited her to a roast chicken dinner at his house in North Kensington. But Boris, despite his popularity, was just not considered seriously. Some months later, the idea was raised again at a lunch at the newspaper’s Kensington offices when Cameron was ‘pleasantly dismissive.’ ‘He wasn’t nasty about Boris,’ recalls a fellow guest, ‘but he just smiled and said, “Yes, that’s an interesting idea isn’t it?” and immediately changed the subject.’

By spring 2007, the whole process of choosing a candidate was a year behind schedule and in danger of descending into farce. Cameron then humiliated both himself – and more particularly, Boles – by approaching the Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell to discuss the idea of a joint Lib Dem-Conservative candidate, Greg Dyke (an interesting fore-runner of the 2010 coalition). Back then, the idea of such a pact between the two parties was considered so outlandish it was quickly dismissed – but not before it had caused considerable personal damage to Boles. Boles (and not Charles Moore, as widely rumoured at the time) leaked news of the discussions to the
Standard
, knowing the publicity would definitively kill them off. Dyke, by inclination a Lib-Dem and formerly a Labour supporter, went on to deny any plans to run for the Mayorship, later saying his mother would never have forgiven him had he stood on a Tory ticket. (Later, he actually came out in support for Ken Livingstone.)

In February 2007, Boles had discovered a lump on his neck and at the end of June, was informed that he would need six months of treatment for cancer. He called Cameron to say he was pulling out on
Monday, 2 July, the very day that the Tory leader was to announce his shadow cabinet reshuffle. Now Cameron did not even have a fallback candidate for an election he knew the Conservatives needed to win. It looked as though, by default, the businessman Steve Norris would step in. Though likeable and competent, he had already lost the mayoral election twice, however, and what was needed now was someone new who could win it.

In the reshuffle Cameron promoted three MPs from the 2005 intake to the top table, including Michael Gove. One of Boris’s ‘stooges’ at Oxford and three years younger, Gove now professionally leap-frogged the senior man. Boris’s age was beginning to trouble him: he was older than all of the shadow cabinet’s key players (Cameron, Osborne, Gove) and by the time they had finished their political careers and moved on, he would be too old to replace them. They were effectively blocking him out from any of the top spots. Some Tories tried to placate Boris by attributing the decision to not being able to promote another Etonian but the idea did not really hold water and in any case, it was not as if Boris had been offered any advancement, however minimal. A close Cameron associate explains: ‘Generally, there was a feeling of do we really
need
to promote Boris?’

So, Boris’s hopes of immediate advance within Westminster were dashed. With Nick Boles out of the running, the job that had tickled his fancy back in March now seemed even more appetising. ‘The shadow cabinet reshuffle unquestionably pushed him,’ recalls a close associate. ‘He didn’t
expect
to be promoted by Cameron, but he had
hoped
to be.’ But he would not want to run if the inevitable result would be a crushing defeat to Ken Livingstone in a city where the Left had long predominated. National polls in July showed the Tories narrowly ahead, but London would always be a harder nut to crack.

Still Cameron could not face approaching the man who now seemed the obvious choice and understandably, Boris did not want to seem too eager – or desperate – to ask. But Cameron did dispatch his spin doctor Andy Coulson to sound him out. And then Nick Boles’ campaign manager, Dan Ritterband (who had also worked as a special adviser to Cameron) cornered Boris at a
Spectator
party with some enticing news. Polling data proved for the first time that Ken was
beatable and for all its Left-leaning tendencies, London could be secured. The whole ‘optic had changed,’ is how one senior Tory has put it.

In the absence of anyone else, Cameron finally put his support behind the idea, texting Boris with the message ‘Don’t go wobbly on me now.’
¹⁰
Word began to seep out that Cameron had changed tack, but understandably Boris did not want to make it too easy for him. ‘Boris really didn’t want to do it,’ claims a well-placed Cameron source. ‘We – George Osborne, Dave himself, Andy Coulson, Steve Hilton – endlessly had to go on about the fact he could win. One of the big factors in persuading him was being able to say that we knew from Veronica [Wadley] that the
Standard
would be completely behind him. There were a lot of meetings and calls, and Dave would keep asking, “Is he there yet?”’

With the news of the
Standard
’s full-square commitment, Boris took a couple of days to discuss the idea with his family. But it was clear that the job was now more enticing. ‘Boris saw that only by making a power base for himself in London could he ever now hope to make his way to the top,’ says a former colleague. By Wednesday the news was out, but in characteristic chaotic style. Boris bumped into Nick Robinson, the BBC political editor who lived near him in north London, early that morning on the tube. ‘Boris clung onto me throughout the journey to stop members of the public mobbing him,’ he recalls. Robinson had heard the rumours of Cameron’s newfound enthusiasm for Boris, yet considered them ‘so implausible’ that he did not even raise them with the very man standing beside him. It was only when they were riding up the escalators at Westminster station that finally Robinson joked: ‘I had this call yesterday and – you’ll never believe it – someone said you were going to run for Mayor of London!’ Instead of the horrified guffaw Robinson was expecting, ‘Boris did that classic Boris thing of “Oh god! Oh right! Aaagh! Oh!” and instead of denying it, which I would have believed, said, “Do me a favour and don’t reveal it for a couple of hours.” I said: “You’re bloody doing it! I don’t believe it!”’ Yet Robinson could not bring himself to believe it” ‘I still regarded it as faintly preposterous – which I suppose is the product of having gone to university with him.’

Armed with this first-hand admission, Robinson wrote about the candidacy on his blog and mentioned it on the BBC’s
Daily Politics
show but only ‘as a jokey “you’ll never guess what” line with Andrew Neil.’ Steve Norris was brought on the phone to condemn it as a ridiculous idea. The story didn’t make the
Six
or
Ten O’Clock News
at all. ‘I just couldn’t see it as real,’ explains Robinson. He suggested that it was down to a change of heart on Cameron’s part that Boris was entering the race, but in a statement swiftly issued by Central Office Boris said: ‘I want to stress that this idea did not come from David Cameron, or from anyone in his office.’ It was a declaration of independence from the centre that Boris has sustained – and repeated – ever since. Understandably, he never wanted to be painted as the Tories’ ‘last chance man’, the desperate solution sought only after all else had failed. And perhaps as a result, still Boris did not actually commit himself completely, citing the obvious impediment that he represented a Parliamentary constituency some 40 miles outside London.